Seagate enters SSD market

Seagate has finally entered the SSD race. The hard drive maker announced its first series of SSD products aimed at consumer and enterprise markets. The move comes as no surprise, it was in the works for quite some time and Seagate is still hiring SSD engineers at its design centre in Colorado.

The Seagate 600 SSD is the company’s first mainstream 2.5-inch SSD. It will ship in capacities up to 480GB and some versions will be just 5mm thick, which means they should be perfect for Ultrabooks. It’s a SATA 6Gbps drive and Seagate promises top notch performance. The high end Seagate 600 Pro takes it all a notch further, with industry leading IOPS/watt and power consumption of just 2.8W. It should be good for cheap servers and perhaps enthusiast rigs.

The Seagate 1200 is a SAS 12Gbps drive aimed at enterprise users. Once again Seagate claims it will deliver the ultimate in speed and practically be best in class.

In addition to 2.5-inch drives, Seagate also cooked up a PCIe card, the Seagate X8 Accelerator. The company claims it will be the fastest thing around, with twice the performance of the closest competitor. With capacities up to 2.2TB and 1.1 million IOPS, it sounds like a beast. Seagate says it is closer to DRAM than SSDs in terms of performance.

There is still no word on pricing or availability, although we are sure the X8 will cost an arm and a leg, so don't get your hopes up.